@bravoguy I like your point of view. First,
You may already know- Rewards panel shows 2 balances, Your balance shows BAT that you own & Estimated earnings show what you will be paid in next payout cycle that begins on 8th each month. When new month begins, Estimated earnings reset and instead you see a banner You X BAT rewards will arrive in Y days on new tab page widget, on brave://rewards/ and on clicking BAT triangle on right side of URL bar.
If you owned some BAT (shown in Your balance), you can see you auto-contributions on brave://rewards-internals/ > Contributions. Next auto-contribute date is 18th June so you may have to wait until that to see how your BATs were contributed.
Now, you will like my point of view too-
I wouldn’t put it that way. The BAT that exists on the block-chain is not centralised and can be acquired/transacted outside of Brave’s ecosystem without KYC. You can see here that the shareholders of BAT are mostly large exchanges and Brave could be one of its minority holders- https://etherscan.io/token/0x0d8775f648430679a709e98d2b0cb6250d2887ef#balances
The vBAT that Saoiray mentioned, exists on Brave’s internal ledger, has limited usage and can be said to be centralised. Brave largely controls who gets to own them. But it’s not hostage to regulation as you don’t need KYC to get it.
And I think if there is a way to move this BAT from internal ledger to a self-custody wallet, you would still not require a KYC as no fiat gets involved. But would be difficult to implemet especially considering Gas fee that wouldn’t leave much of the value of monthly earned BAT, for transfer. Bridging internal ledger to Ethereum network would also be another challenge.
So just for exhanging BAT or vBAT for fiat would require KYC/AML adoption.
That said, Brave’s one of the masterpiece Themis- 1 & 2 are in the works. And with Solana integration, providing fast & low fee transactions, Brave might become able to process Ads on-chain using Themis. Then getting Solana-pegged BAT directly in our self-custody wallets wouldn’t be a distant dream.